What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

'What does a woman want?'―the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte―is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.

• Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
• Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture
• Strangers to Ourselves
• The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century
• Studies on Hysteria (Basic Books Classics)
• A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits)
• What IS Sex? (Short Circuits)
• Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, Calif.) )
• Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation
• ...or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan